Movie review: 'Children of Invention' a haunting look at the immigrant experience

Friday

Feb 26, 2010 at 12:01 AMFeb 26, 2010 at 6:31 PM

If timing is everything, Tze Chun reaps a bonanza with his first feature, “Children of Invention,” an opportune tale of two Chinese-American tykes swept into the vortex of a perfect storm of foreclosures, joblessness and Ponzi schemes.

Al Alexander

If timing is everything, Tze Chun reaps a bonanza with his first feature, “Children of Invention,” an opportune tale of two Chinese-American tykes swept into the vortex of a perfect storm of foreclosures, joblessness and Ponzi schemes.

With subtle nods to Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” Chun puts you hauntingly inside the heads of kids too young to understand why they’ve lost their home, father and childhood to an economic system that rewards the crooks and punishes the innocent.

While their schoolmates frolic without a care, Raymond (10-year-old Michael Chen) and Tina (8-year-old Crystal Chiu) are forced to survive on a steady diet of Ramen noodles while their frazzled mother, Elaine (Cindy Cheung), a recent divorcee, naively chases get-rich-quick schemes.

Tze proves a master at depicting the children’s hunger, loneliness and frustration in a series of heartbreaking scenes in which they are left for hours in the back of Elaine’s car while she’s busily selling door-to-door cosmetic franchises to clients just as poor and gullible as her.

Not that “home” is any great shakes. Or at least what they call home, which is a model apartment inside a suburban Boston condominium complex that’s been mothballed by investors until the economy rebounds.

While they aren’t exactly squatters, they are living there surreptitiously courtesy of a friend who asks that they only keep the windows covered sufficiently enough to prevent anyone from seeing the light shining from within.

That metaphor of people on the fringe being cloaked is an effective one for Tze in his intent to satirize the Lou Dobbses of the world who would like nothing better than to see immigrants held in a self-imposed solitary confinement.

It seriously makes you question how life in the U.S. is any better for Elaine and her kids than it would be in Hong Kong, a communist-ruled city where her deadbeat husband fled to long ago for that very reason.

Even more intriguing is the way Tze juxtaposes Elaine’s plan to get rich by shuffling cash pyramid style through her unwitting investors (a la Goldman Sachs), to her son’s plan to finance, build, market and sell a neat little gadget that stirs noodles.

Raymond, of course, represents what the immigrant experience used to resemble back in the day, when some of our greatest inventions were conceived by people who fled to our shores from distant lands.

Thus the movie’s double-entendre title, but there’s far more to Tze’s agenda than mere subtle political messages and picturesque views of Boston and the South Shore. There’s also a great deal of heart, along with a moving tribute to the resiliency and fortitude of children, particularly the sons and daughters of first-generation immigrants.

Unlike families that have lived here for decades, if not centuries, America’s newest citizens have something to prove to themselves and others to a degree few comprehend. But through resplendent depictions of sacrifice and bravery shot by Chris Teague and edited by Newton native Anna Boden (“Sugar”), Tze enables the family’s bumpy pursuit of happiness resonate with just about everyone.

What echoes louder, though, is the inescapable feeling that much has been lost in terms of our chase of the American dream. And minus that long-held ideal, Tze rightly questions what’s become of a nation that no longer values its huddled masses.

Al Alexander may be reached at aalexander@ledger.com.

CHILDREN OF INVENTION (Not rated) Cast includes Cindy Cheung, Michael Chen and Crystal Chiu. Written and directed by Tze Chun. 3 stars out of 4.